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Friday, 18 December 2015

THE FABLED WILD WEST

Last post I mentioned that I'd been working on some poems, well here is one, it's about ready for sharing. It is not finished by any means but the bones are there.

Here
we are in the fabled Wild West,

you
know the one,

peopled
exclusively by white men.

A
land that was only new to these invaders,

whose
idea of civilisation had no room for others.

So
lets play along with the myth

and
the story arc of the over the hill gunslinger,

whose
lost his nerve and is on one last job,

that
leads him to stand outside a door,

wondering
if his death waits inside.

Taste
his fear, see his hands shake.

He
gathers himself, and kicks that door open,

outdraws
the bad men

[though
he is the one dressed in black]

and
frees the farmers, as he was supposed to.

Absorbed
in his own legend, he pauses,

watches
the farmers fighting back,

is
shot in the stomach and dies holding on to wall.

Then
there's me, sat in the dark,

right
side of the white line,

Saturday
afternoon films, 1961.

That
scene has stayed with me since,

the
film one of my favourites,

perhaps
I was just the right age to be impressed,

to
buy into their world vision

-
this was pre-internet,

before
the communication revolution.

I
had yet to watch Vietnam unfold

nightly
on the tv news,

or
to see the American Empire begin to crumble.

The Magnificent Seven is one of my favourite films and recently I had been talking about that scene, the one the poem describes and it led me to write the poem. Robert Vaughan plays the gunfighter but I can't find the clip of his death on line- apologies.I did however find Annabelle Chvostek singing Racing With The Sun.